But don't worry, Evelyn Gonzalez Figueroa will be studio sitting to answer your questions. Many of the paintings on view in my studio will be part of my next solo exhibition- "Between Moment and Memory" which will be held at the Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, Utah during the Sundance Film Festival.

The historic 22,000 square foot hangar at 3026 Airport Avenue at the Santa Monica Airport will be open on Saturday, December 3rd from 6 to 9 pm. More than 30 artists will open their studios for the event which continues on Sunday, December 4th from 1 to 5 pm.

In the year that Santa Monica Art Studios has been open, it has already become a destination for museum groups, collectors, curators and the general public. Over 3,000 attended the opening celebration in October 2004 that included a ribbon cutting by the Mayor and City Council members. The studios have hosted groups from LACMA, MOCA, Southern California Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Venice Art Walk, Brandeis University, Santa Monica College Mentors Program and the Santa Monica City Schools among many others.

Santa Monica Art Studios also includes ARENA 1, a 2400 square foot gallery where cutting edge work has been featured in shows organized by invited curators. During the anniversary event, ARENA 1 will host “The Shape of Space” a group exhibition curated by Sherin Guirguis and Heather Harmon. Five exhibitions in the past year curated by Malik Gaines, Christine Duval, Diana Kunce and Michael Oliveri, Lee Kwan Hun, and Bruria Finkel have featured artists from Santa Monica, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, China and Korea. Future exhibitions include “Ab Ovo” organized by Steven Hull and “Leaving Aztlan Redux” curated by Kaytie Johnson.

Sherry Frumkin Gallery which has organized several critically acclaimed exhibitions over the past year, will present a solo exhibition of work by Kimberly Squaglia for the anniversary celebrations.

Santa Monica Art Studios hosts a very well received public lecture and discussion series “Categorically Not!” organized by noted science writer KC Cole. The monthly Sunday evening events have included Nobel Prize winning scientists like Roald Hoffman as well as actors such as Julia Sweeney, writers like Jonathan Kirsch, and musicians and visual artists who address a topic selected by Cole and then mix it up with the audience.

Yossi Govrin, an artist with two decades of experience running artist studios in Santa Monica, originally conceived the project as a way to address the loss of affordable studios in Santa Monica and developed the hangar with co-director Sherry Frumkin.

Monday, November 28, 2005

An Open Letter to Mayor Villaraigosa: Please Save Our LACMA Murals

I want to thank you for the bold steps that you have taken to create a Los Angeles for the 21st Century. Your vision and ideals are inspiring.

Not long ago you attended the opening of Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi's film: "A Day Without a Mexican". Your commitment to challenging (and humorous) art is evident.

Last May - Sergio Arau, Yareli Arizmendi, and the film's cinematographer Alan Caudillo - attended the opening of my exhibition at the LACMA Art Rental and Sales Gallery. It was an evening of spirit, camaraderie and possibility. We pledged our support to you in the upcoming election and knew that if the time came for the art community to reach out for your help that you would listen. That time has come sooner than we thought.

It has been reported that in a few days, on December 1st, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is slated to demolish its parking garage to make way for a new building to display contemporary art.

Tyler Green explains in his op-ed piece, entitled LACMA's choice, in today's Los Angeles Times: "The problem isn't that LACMA is demolishing a garage so that it can add gallery space, the problem is that LACMA isn't saving the art it commissioned for the garage."

The paintings slated for destruction this week were created in 2000, on the occasion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Made in California" exhibit. The museum commissioned the artists Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen to fill the garage with their captivating, contemporary art.

Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen have become recognized as two of the United States' most prominent artists. Their work has been exhibited at and collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Tyler Green adds, "The destruction of Margaret Kilgallen's work would be especially disappointing. She died of cancer in 2001 at the age of 33. Relatively few of her works still exist." After Margaret's death, Barry McGee has quietly and heroically raised their child as a single dad. It would be a shame to destroy some of Margaret Kilgallen's few remaining artworks and deprive Barry and his child of a tangible, physical connection to Margaret's life and art.

Margaret Kilgallen(detail of a mural currently in the LACMA garage)

Like Sergio and Yareli's film, Barry and Margaret's paintings are works of deep power that also carry the humor of our daily lives. It would be a shame to lose these paintings forever.

We hope you will take the time to call the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and ask the museum to slow down the demolition to properly determine how to save at least some of Margaret Kilgallen's and Barry McGee's work in the garage.

The art community of Los Angeles looks forward to working with you in the weeks and months ahead.

Thank You

Barry McGee reinterpreting one of Margaret Kilgallen's pieces for a show at the San Jose Museum of Art 2002

Kriston's Eye Level at the Smithsonian

"I'm excited to introduce Eye Level , the blog for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It's one of just a few museums forging new ground with new media (and is host to the Smithsonian's first blog!). Today's the official launch and I hope you'll check in frequently.

When the Smithsonian American Art Museum reopens its renovated historic main building in July 2006, it will be a showcase for American art that celebrates this nation's vision and creativity. SAAM's blog Eye Level is part of the museum's continuing effort to explore the stories central to the American experienceand to search for what connects Americans today.

Using the museum's collection as a touchstone, the conversation at Eye Level will center on the ways in which the nation's art connects to its history and culture. The discussion will extend beyond works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to include other collections, exhibitions, and events.

Eye Level presents a collaboration among curators, conservators, historians, enthusiasts, critics, designers, and of course bloggers*all participants in the story of American art. We invite you to join the discussion at Eye Level ."

Favorites in the de Young: Edwin W. Dickinson, "The Cello Player"

"Dickinson is not a name that carries instant recognition outside the circles of art historians and artists. He spanned (1891 - 1978) a period in American art history which jumped from academic Realism to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism and through all of these changes he retained his own style, pausing here and there to prove that he was thoroughly informed by all the new schools in the arts while continuing his mission as a representational artist. His studios were in New York and in Cape Cod and it is here that he observed and painted the world as he saw it. Some of his canvases took years to complete."
-Grady Harp

Friday, November 18, 2005

A Museum for San Francisco & the Americas

by Gregg Chadwick

Olmec Sculpturephoto by Gregg Chadwick

"In 1862 plantation workers in Huaypan, Veracruz, thought that they had found a large overturned iron kettle buried in the ground. Believing that it might hide a cache of gold, they dug -- and dug -- and dug, eventually revealing a colossal stone portrait head. This was the first Olmec sculpture to be discovered in Mexico. It would be nearly 70 years before a number of extraordinary objects of jade and stone were to be seen as stylistically related and of a culture which nobody had known. That culture was arbitrarily named "Olmec" for the peoples who, at the time of the Spanish conquest, had inhabited the region where the first head had been found."
- Gillett G. Griffin, from the catalog eesay for "The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership" exhibited at The Art Museum, Princeton University in 1996.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have a new building to house the de Young museum and a new director to lead both the de Young and the Legion of Honor. Tyler Green in Modern Art Notes reveals that John Buchanan, current director of the Portland Art Museum, will step in for Harry Parker upon his departure from the FAMSF.

Greeting John Buchanan upon his arrival will be a powerfully sculpted stone Olmec head. This massive sculpture, on loan from the Mexican government, carries enormous metaphysical power that, in the autumn of this year, seems to bear portents of our future.

According to Gillett G. Griffin, from the catalog esay for "The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership":

The Olmecs believed that the human body divided itself into three cosmic levels: the celestial, the terrestrial and the underworld.

The head represented the celestial realm which indicates that the colossal heads found in Veracruz were probably ancestral portraits depicting the exalted seat of the mind.

Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle recently stated: "The implicit global reach of its collections makes a new conundrum for the de Young in an era struggling to think in planetary terms. As a museum focused on American art, the de Young inevitably tracked American art into the 21st century, where it has already begun to seem much less central to world culture than it did between 1950 and 2000."

I disagree with Kenneth Baker's forecast. John Buchanan, as did Harry Parker before him, needs to remember that a museum focused on American art should open up its definition of America. How often, we in the United States lay claim to two continents in our linguistic hubris by referring to ourselves as Americans while excluding the rest of the Americas that range from Canada through Mexico, Central America and South America to the tip of Tierra del Fuego.

The United States under the current regime is losing favor overseas. But San Francisco is a special city, whose culture and politics find favor in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Maybe the deYoung will be less a museum focused on the United States and more a museum focused on the Americas as a whole and the world beyond. It can only help that the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will have a broader, more global, focus in the future.

I suggest that Harry Parker on his way out and John Buchanan on his first day in, sit before this ancient Olmec head and listen for the portents that it brings.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Lee Mullican at LACMA

"Mullican, like many other artists of his generation, was consumed with the question of how spirituality could be effectively represented in art. He had been stationed with the Army in Guam when atomic bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, with thousands of other American soldiers in the Pacific, he was sent to occupy Japan immediately after.

Faced with the unprecedented potential for nuclear annihilation, and soon given the emerging truth about the Holocaust in Europe, matters of life's sanctity were pressing in the years following the war. Creativity itself held profound intrinsic value — and in a measure unmatched in American culture before. History had brought the world to the brink. Artists, many of them returned from the battlefields, reasonably surmised that a reconsideration of prehistory might provide a platform from which to start over."- Christopher Knight, LA Times

I studied with Lee Mullican at UCLA. As the years have progressed it has become evident within my own work how Mullican's deep spirituality and profound humanism provided glimpses of an artistic path to follow. Lee Mullican cherished each living organism. His first hand knowledge of humanity's propensity for destruction set him on a path to create artworks that spoke not just of his own personal psychology. Instead, Mullican throughout his career grappled with the problem of creating art that limns our place in a larger universe.

For thousands of years, one of the profound mysteries of the human adventure has been the creative impulse. The urge to make new things, to leave our mark, to express ourselves, is essential to what makes us human. While most creative people focus on one art form, there is a venerable tradition, from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Picasso and Akira Kurosawa, that teaches creativity as one vast continuum with no real distinction between drawing and writing.

In this spirit, Gregg Chadwick and Phil Cousineau will use slideshows, film-clips, music, and discussion to explore the intimate relationship between words and images, as well as innovative writing, drawing and painting exercises to encourage fresh ways of seeing and expressing. The workshop will explore crossover techniques between the art forms, such as listening for the color of music while drawing, or sketching word colors while working on a poem. The goal is to marry words to images, text to paint, in order to see and feel in new ways.

Other themes include:Play theory, visualization, and active imaginationArt and anxiety in a time of war and lossPursuit of excellence vs. pursuit of successThe role of mentors

This workshop is for artists, writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, as well as teachers, parents, coaches, psychologists, and business leaders—all who are fascinated with the creative adventure.

Wunderkammer

This special open house will borrow from the Renaissance “Wunderkammer” tradition—every usable surface of the Institute will be covered with projects created during the organization’s 15 year history.

Ole Worm's Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities)
Frontispiece from the 1655 catalog : "Worm's Museum, or the History of Very Rare Things, Natural and Artificial, Domestic and Exotic, Which Are Stored in the Author's House in Copenhagen."*

The Danish professor of medicine Ole Worm (1588-1654) believed that learning comes about through the observation of nature - "through empiricism and experiment" - and not just through the study of texts. Worm firmly believed that vision was the most trustworthy sense for investigations of our environment.

To explore these ideas, Ole Worm assembled a sort of museum or Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities) in his Copenhagen home. Filled with ethnographic specimens, skulls, stuffed animals, and the latest in optical and experimental devices, the early museum was both artwork and laboratory.

Many of the ICI projects on view during their "Wunderkammer" open house, focus on mechanisms of analysis that through time have become lost, forgotten or suppressed:

Melinda Smith Altshuler "Self Portrait"

Melinda Smith Altshuler, an associate at the ICI, discovers and recreates, almost like an artistic crime scene investigator, personal histories found in discarded memorabilia and cast off items from daily life. We are drawn into her artwork as if into another world. And we ask questions. What is this amber material on which these images hover? Is it a sort of paper or skin? Who are these people peering out at us from the past? What are they trying to tell us? But unlike the television investigators on CSI, when Melinda finishes her examinations, more questions, not less, remain. Melinda Smith Altshuler's artworks provide beautiful clues to a past that is just out of reach and a future that we can almost, but not quite, grasp. Her profoundly poignant work investigates memory and also hope.

Another work that I am interested in exploring at the ICI is the forthcoming book: "Searching for Sebald": an investigation by Christel Dillbohner and Lise Patt of the late author and photographer, W.G. Sebald. W.G. Sebald's writings, prose and poetry, are open ended investigations into experience.

Christel Dillbohner and Lise Patt have found that many recent scholarly texts address Sebald's complex prose, "Searching for Sebald" will be the first to explore Sebald's fictive world by discussing the anti-heroic photographs that propel and interrupt his twisting narratives.

Like Lise Patt from The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, I have dreamt that Wim Wenders put me in a movie. It was a scene with Columbo (Peter Falk) and we were drawing together on a street that flickered back and forth from black and white to color. We didn't talk. And there was a wind whipping the pages of our sketchbooks as if the angel of history had just lifted off.

* (The artist Rosamond Purcell fashioned a meticulous re-creation of Ole Worm's collection in her exhibition "Rosamond Purcell: Two Rooms," organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and curator Lisa Melandri.)

Monday, November 07, 2005

Special Screening of Wim Wenders' "Land of Plenty" in Los Angeles

Wim Wenders's 2003 film The Land of Plenty will be opening on November 11th for an exclusive one-week run at the Laemmle's Music Hall in Beverly Hills, California. The film deals with themes that are common to Wenders's work: angst, alienation, and America—but in Land of Plenty these themes are explored through a uniquely spiritual and post 9-11 perspective. The film tells the story of Lana (Michelle Williams), who returns to the United States after years of living abroad with her American missionary father. Though she has returned to America with plans to continue her education, Lana instead sets out to find her only other living relative—her uncle Paul, her deceased mother’s brother. A Vietnam veteran, Paul is a reclusive vagabond with deep emotional war wounds. A tragic event witnessed by the two unites them in a common goal to rectify a wrong and takes them on a journey of healing, discovery, and kinship. The Hollywood Reporter says in a recent review of the film, "The sense of wonderment and desire for understanding that envelop the old soldier and the young disciple create a mood of profound optimism."

Wim Wenders will be present for Q&A after the Friday and Saturday night screenings of the film.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

The Burnt Paintings

Jessey Dorr's "Off to the Oyster Beds," a painting found at a garage sale, led the buyer, Davis Dutton, on a several-year search for the painter. Photo courtesy of the Davis Dutton Collection

Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle has a wonderful piece by the Los Angeles bookseller* and author Davis Dutton on the search for the artist behind a haunting painting found gathering dust in a garage. This account is so well written that it calls out to become a book. It has much to say about art and life in California in the early part of the 20th Century:

Artist Jessey Dorr: Born into a wealthy Nob Hill family, she was a strong-willed woman who burned her paintings after a bad review. Photo by Imogen Cunningham

As an artist I always wonder where my works will end up in fifty or a hundred years. Like most painters I know,(See Martin Bromirski at Anaba), I have found a few treasures stacked against the walls in small shops. I once found an original Cezanne etching in a thrift store in San Francisco. Any other finds out there?

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